U.S. SEN. Barack Obama's glassy-eyed supporters are enraptured. The media are docile. Hollywood stars make music videos about him.

"There is something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism," Joe Klein of Time magazine has observed.

But we ask you, does the campaign poster on this page remind you of a totalitarian cult?

Wait, don't answer that.

The Soviet-style heroic Obama, the use of a single word "Hope," do make the SEPTA bus shelter posters a bit reminiscent of George Orwell's "1984."

Its more direct antecedent is John Carpenter's 1988 paranoid totalitarian fantasy flick, "They Live." Replace the word "Hope" with "Obey" on that Obama poster and tell us what you think.

The poster was designed by urban street artist/skateboarder Shepard Fairey, who enjoys a successful career as an artist and designer in Los Angeles.

Fairey gained fame with a couple of viral street-art campaigns in the 1990s, including "Andre the Giant has a Posse" and "Obey Giant," which resulted in thousands of small posters and stickers appearing on lamp posts and walls (and everywhere else) in urban centers around the nation.